Monday, July 25, 2005

Installing ATI drivers

I have a ATI Radeon card and when its time to update the graphics card display driver, the approach recommended is to first uninstall the previous drivers and then continue with the setup of the new one.Though theres nothing wrong with this approach, sometimes I feel uncomfortable to restart the pc after uninstalling, then rebooting, then installing the new drivers and then again rebooting , finally making the new drivers come into effect.

The alternative approach I used requires ony 1 reboot (though thats not a big point) but I really like it as compared to the above.

Its simple.I download the new drivers...run the exe so the files get extracted to C:\ATI (which is default) and when the setup starts I cancel it.Then I go to device manager from My Computer and then select my display adapter from the list.Double click on it to view its properties and finally in the Driver tab click on update driver ..then by specifyng the have disk option I give the path of C:\ATI\Drivers folder.Click on either a .inf file named something as CX_??? (for XP) or CK_??? (for Win 2K). Thats it.Requires only one reboot and I am done.Ofcourse this is to update only the display driver and not the control centre but I since I don't use it much..I find this method quite comfortable